


Too Short A Season

by trill_gutterbug



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: In Which Trill Continues to Name Fics after Star Trek Episodes Because Why the Eff Not, Multi, Post-Movie, aka what definitely happened immediately after the last scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 13:26:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12169782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trill_gutterbug/pseuds/trill_gutterbug
Summary: “Well,” says Solo. His hand flexes on the railing. He toasts them both and tosses back the inch of whiskey in his glass. He swallows and makes a face. “Let's get drunk, shall we?”





	Too Short A Season

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by my bae, kaasknot, without whom I'd be fucked but not in the good way.

Waverly abandons them on that balcony in Rome with the vaguest possible explanation for their continuing situation, and the sort of smirk that implies he knows very well just how vague it is. An awkward silence descends. The sun is high and hot. A pigeon lands nearby and coos a question about their tray of untouched sugar biscuits. 

Gaby clears her throat and looks down, adjusting her sunglasses so she won't have to make eye contact with Illya, who seems to be caught between two excruciating, if silent, extremes of bewilderment and excitement. His face is twitching in a way Gaby is too embarrassed to look at straight on.

“Well,” says Solo. His hand flexes on the railing. He toasts them both and tosses back the inch of whiskey in his glass. He swallows and makes a face. “Let's get drunk, shall we?”

~*~

They finish the bottle on the balcony.

(“I thought you didn't drink!” Gaby protests when Illya, grimacing like he's been prescribed a vile but life-saving medicine, swallows the double finger Solo pours him.

“I don't drink,” says Illya grimly, setting his glass down. “On the job.”)

Gaby stirs her finger through the cool ashes of the computer disc, one elbow leaned on the edge of the table and her chin propped in her palm. “Good riddance,” she says, and they all drink to that.

When the decanter is empty, Solo puts its glass top back on with a flourish too precise to be anywhere near sober. “I propose we relocate.” He fixes them both in turn with a cocked brow and a pursed lip, already assuming their agreement but making a show of it. “I have quite a comfortable chaise indoors, and a reasonably stocked bar.”

Gaby salutes Solo and scoots her chair back from the table. “Lead on.”

Solo takes them inside, the empty bottle in one hand. Illya follows at Gaby's heels. She does a slow spin halfway there to make sure he's not too close, or maybe the opposite of that, and he gives her a look from beneath his brows that's still a little confused but mostly simmered down into something like quiet alertness. She conjures up a mock frown, peering over the top of her sunglasses. She's planning to say something teasing, a little jibe or a backhanded invitation, but before she can, he lifts a hand to stop her from smacking into the door frame.

“Careful,” he says. His fingers curl over her shoulder, his thumb touching her collarbone.

“Sir.” She shakes her head, derailed but unbothered by it. Her hair is frizzing loose from its pins, tickling her cheeks. “I am  _ always _ careful.”

He doesn't reply to that, but he smirks. She hadn't meant, necessarily, to put him at ease, but she's glad that she has.

Solo is already pouring them fresh drinks when they get inside, his back to them at the bar. “For you, Gaby,” he says without looking up, “I think vodka and lime.” His hands are busy, lifting bottles off the lazy Susan, stirring something with a tinkle of silver on glass. He bends to open the little refrigerator beneath the bar. Gaby tips her head sideways to regard the generous round of his buttocks beneath the seat of his trousers. There's the subtlest motif in the pattern of the fabric, she notices; a faint iridescent paisley, perhaps, or a fleur de lis.

“And for you, Peril…” Solo straightens and turns on one heel to regard them. He is mostly composed, although there's a light flush to his cheeks and his hair is beginning to curl loose from its pomade. He squints one eye at Illya over Gaby’s head, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth. “Mint julep.”

Illya grunts. It's not a displeased sound, Gaby thinks. When he speaks, his voice is such a close deep rumble she can almost feel it up her spine. “Why?”

“Have you had one before?” Solo turns back to the bar, a lime and a sprig of greenery from the refrigerator in hand.

“No.”

“I have,” Gaby interjects. “They're good.”

“They certainly are.” Solo plucks a short-bladed knife from its stand and slices into the lime with a sleek economy of motion that Gaby’s whisky-lubricated mind finds terribly thrilling. “Sharp, refreshing, and powerful.” Solo throws a look over his shoulder that, by the angle of his grin, is clearly meant to be interpreted with at least three layers of meaning. What he doesn't say, and what Gaby knows he doesn't want her to say either, is that a mint julep is traditionally a woman's drink: light, pretty, and sweet.

Gaby turns just enough that she can look up at Illya with one eye. “You'll like it,” she stage whispers.

“Some music?” Solo suggests. “If you'll do the honors, Gaby. I don't trust Peril here not to choose Wagner.”

Gaby snorts. “I don't know why you think you can trust me,” she mutters, but she goes to the record player anyway. There's nothing very surprising, for a hotel selection, so she puts Charlie Parker on the turntable and sets the needle. Sax streams out of the speakers, fast and bubbly. Her hips move to follow the rhythm of it, feet twisting in the carpet, but that's too clumsy. She bends to undo the straps of her shoes. It's difficult, woozy; she catches herself on the table with one hand and chuckles at herself. She kicks her shoes into the corner and that’s much better. She does a little shimmy in a circle, letting the music loosen her spine, trip its lively fingers up her ribs and down her arms, wiggle her fingers and bob her head. She shuts her eyes and her ears to everything but the happy sound of it, picturing herself back in her little garage in the middle of the night, the way she used to dance after everyone had gone home and it was just her and a greasy old record player and a stack of battered vinyl, the arms of her coveralls tied around her waist, the wrench in her sweaty hand good as any microphone.

She turns, doing a shuffling sideways step she'd picked up a year ago in a shady dance hall in the basement of a paper factory. Illya is watching her from the centre of the room, his chin dipped. She meets his eyes and waggles her brows outrageously, humming along with the music. He smiles back at her, but the expression on his face is so unexpectedly tender, not indulgent or amused, but almost… She doesn’t know. Reverent. Maybe that is the word. Whatever, it knots her stomach with a sick swooping curl of heat and she has to look away.

By the time Solo brings a tray with three sweating glasses to the coffee table, Gaby has unpinned her hair and cha-cha’d halfway around the room, following the lead of the music and the weight of Illya's attention, immersing herself in the former and pretending not to notice the latter.

“Madam,” says Solo, lifting a hand to her as she comes around the arm of the sofa. She takes it with overblown grace, performing a wriggling finale she fancies salsa-inspired, and bends to press an extravagant kiss to the back of Solo’s hand. It is dry and smooth beneath her lips, his knuckles enormous in comparison to her thumb. He escorts her into the nearest armchair and delivers her cold glass in a motion yet again too carefully assured for the amount of alcohol he's had.

“Thank you, sir,” Gaby says, grinning up at him. She's sweating a little herself, warm and pleasantly heavy in every limb.

Solo picks up one of the other glasses, green at the bottom with mint, fizzing at the top. “Peril.” He holds it out to Illya.

Illya hesitates for only a moment, his eyes darting from Gaby to Solo to the glass. He takes it, nodding. They end up sharing the couch, Solo and Illya, and Gaby sits across from them on her own little island of brocade and horsehair only as long as it takes them to finish their first round and for Solo to go to the bar for a second. Then she clambers up on the table and down the other side and collapses next to Illya in a heap.

He looks down at her, his empty glass of crushed mint and ice still cupped in one hand. His eyes are painfully blue.

“Hello,” Gaby says.

“Hello,” Illya replies.

“Did you like it?” Gaby flicks her fingernail against his glass.

He nods, tipping it toward her in a shallow toast. “Sharp and refreshing.”

“And powerful,” Gaby says. From this angle, the breadth of his shoulders and the line of his jaw make her think perhaps she's been silly for her reticence. There is nothing about Illya Kuryakin that isn't utterly surmountable; no horrendous attitude, no ego, no predilection for violence. No questionable loyalties or intentions. Only the golden roughness of his stubble and the length of his lashes. Only the loose button at the collar of his shirt. Only his fingers nearly touching one another around the bowl of his glass. She wants to reach up and touch his forearm where the cuff of his sleeve lies, map out the lines of hair and tendon there. She takes a deep slow breath instead, measuring herself. 

“I was lonely over there,” she says.

Illya nods again. “Practically Switzerland.”

“Well.” Gaby lets her eyelids droop just a bit lower, along with her voice. It’s deliberate. Of course it is. She is a very subtle young lady. “Not quite so impartial.”

“Here we are,” says Solo, reappearing at the end of the chaise with fresh glasses. Illya’s gaze darts up from where it has dropped to Gaby’s mouth, or perhaps somewhere south of that, and Gaby rolls her head on her loose neck to see. Solo’s lost his tie somewhere. His hair is a wreck. He'd been pushing his hands through it while they'd talked. He gives Gaby her second vodka lime and reaches over her head to deliver another mint julep to Illya. The popping soda mists Gaby's face with a tiny cool touch.

“Thank you,” Illya says. Gaby watches him set aside his empty glass and sip the new one. Now that she's paying attention, his cheeks are pink too. He glances at her from under his lashes. His gaze sticks.

Solo sits down with his scotch on the rocks. With all three of them on the couch it's a bit of a squish, but Gaby doesn't mind. Solo's thigh is firm against hers, his arm draped across the top of the couch to give her more room.

“I noticed a curious thing earlier,” Solo says, and then describes a famous painting in the downstairs lobby that he’s sure is an original, despite the concierge's assurance that it is a reproduction. His story is not very interesting, but how he tells it is, the illustrative motion of his hands gracefully expansive the way a limber dancer might describe the plot of a ballet with his body. Gaby is distracted so thoroughly by the turn of his wrists, the blunt strength of his fingers, that she slides lower on the chaise, her side tucked against Illya's thigh, without noticing. When she does notice, it is only because Illya's hand has touched her hip where it's pressed to his knee. Not firmly, not suddenly, but with the back of his fingers. She hardly feels it at first, then she does, and looks. Her heart turns over in her chest. His hand is curved around the bone of her hip, his fingertips just brushing the edge of her skirt. She slips her hand down and fits it into his.

The cadence of Solo’s voice dissolves into a shapeless hum. Gaby can’t hear anything over the sound of her own breathing and the hammer of her own pulse. She watches Illya turn her hand over and slide his thumb into the cup of her palm. It strokes there, across the length of her life line, twice and then three times, slowly. Not for all the world does she want to disrupt the enormity of this moment, too large for the smallness of their movements. But she can’t help herself. She tips her head back to look up at him.

He is looking back at her, his blue eyes and golden stubble, the fall of hair across his forehead. Every line of his face is begging her. She can’t possibly say no. She puts her mostly empty glass down on the coffee table and reaches to take the back of Illya’s neck. He bends to meet her without an instant of hesitation. Gaby opens her mouth to the stroke of his tongue and although they are kissing upside down, a bit sideways, it is the best kiss she has had in a million years. Her body lights on fire.

Distantly, she hears Solo stammer and trail off. It’s a shame, but there are more important things to pay attention to. She twists to get upright, scrambling onto her knees. That split second of being parted from Illya is too much; she puts both arms around his neck as soon as she is able and ducks to kiss him again, properly this time, so that they can taste one another without teeth or noses in the way. One of his arms circles her waist, pulling her into him hard enough to make her breathless all over again.

“Ah,” says Solo. “I’ll, uh… leave you to it, I think...”

The couch shifts as he moves to stand. It is the one thing that could possibly distract Gaby from what she’s doing. She pulls back from Illya’s lovely hot mouth and reaches for Solo, curling a hand in his open collar before he can get any farther. He looks back at her, poised half-risen. There’s something guileless in his eyes, in the openness of his lips.

“No,” Gaby says. “Don’t go.”

Illya had buried his face in the curve of her neck when she turned away from him, but he lifts it now. She doesn’t look at him to gauge his reaction; she doesn’t need to.

But Solo does. His gaze flicks over Gaby’s shoulder and locks there for a long moment. Some silent communication passes between the two men. Gaby, perched between them with a hand on each, knows that she is an Archimedean miracle, an infinitely small fulcrum with the capacity to move mountains. She waits for the world to align around her.

Charlie Parker plays on in the background, nearly forgotten. Illya breathes beneath her. An unnamed thing grows in the space between them.

“Alright,” says Solo.

 


End file.
